What percent of Republican office holders attended segregated schools?

[Under The Radar]

Not just meaning public schools, private schools included too.
I know Brown v Board was 1954, but my home school district didn’t fully integrate until 1968. (Other than the one test pupil per class). Cleveland Mississippi didn’t desegregate schools until 2016.
If you lived in my school district you could be as young as 67 and have graduated with a segregated education.
With that said, the average age of the Senate is 63 years old.
Could this be why we are still having issues about legislating with diversity?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Lots of us attended segregated schools. Alas.

When I moved my sons from an excellent public school in Overland Park, KS in the very late 1990s to a private secular school, they went from an essentially 100% white school to one that at least had a token number of non white students.

One nice thing about that school was that when a new family was coming in after first grade, an already present family was asked to welcome the newcomer. That happened to us when we first enrolled and it was a wonderful experience.

Several years later, as my younger son was getting ready to enter 7th grade, I got a call from the school asking if I'd be the welcoming family for a new family. Of course! I loved the school and had found it a great place and was more than happy to welcome a new family. Talking with the mom of the new student I was pretty sure she was African American. We arranged a time for us, me and my son, she and her daughter, to meet at a nearby bowling alley. I told my son that I was fairly certain they were African American, mainly because I didn't want him to respond in a weird way. He was a good kid, but unfortunately race issues being what they are, I really, really wanted this new family to feel welcomed and wanted.

Yep, I was right. They were African American and lived close enough to me that we wound up doing a car pool thing.

Somewhat more to the point, the private school had a far greater diversity than the otherwise excellent public school.

[Under The Radar]

2. That occurrence would be rare in the south. Very rare.

In the south most private schools were founded around the time the schools were desegregated.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Oh, yes. Some years ago, when my sister was living in Columbus, Georgia,

we happened across the private schools that were founded to counteract desegregation. It was a very unpleasant experience.

The private secular school I enrolled my sons in was founded in 1884 when the city fathers asked two recent Wellesley College graduates to start a school.

The reason I moved my sons from the very excellent public school to the private school was because my older son was being bullied in the public school. He was very small for his age, and had alopecia areata, an auto immune disorder that causes hair loss. He was totally bald, no head hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, so he definitely looked different. Also, he was essentially a scholar. Loved learning. Had zero interest in the local professional football or baseball teams. Both of which were very important. But he simply wasn't in that mind set.

At the start of his sixth grade year in the elementary school, a good friend, whose older son was a year older than mine, called me up and gave me chapter and verse why I should not send my son to the middle school. The middle school was 7th and 8th grades, which meant the 8th graders bullied the 7th graders mercilessly, apparently unchecked by teachers or administration. Her son, who was far better at defending himself was bullied so badly that she switched him to a different middle school in the district. She said, "You've told me sending your son to private school was an option for you. Do not send him to the public middle school."

At the time I had a friend who had five children, who collectively attended three different private schools, because she understood that no one school was right for all of her kids. So I called her up, explained what was going on, and she said, "This school is right for you." I called them up, scheduled a visit, and my only regret is that I didn't move my son immediately. I could have, but he felt that he should finish his sixth grade year in the local school, mainly because he'd seen how mid year transfers tended not to do well.

Once he was in the new school, things were remarkably different. Being smart was no longer derided. My son was now rewarded for being smart. Heck, he did Science Bowl starting his freshman year, and every year his team placed locally. His junior and senior year his team went to nationals.

Currently, he is in a PhD program in astronomy, and I often reference him as My Son The Astronomer. Earlier tonight we had a conversation about the history of the universe.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

4. My school district was effectively segregated...

Last edited Thu Jul 8, 2021, 02:59 AM - Edit history (2)

... but not because there was any racial segregation rules in place. The school districts were local, and my childhood community was overwhelmingly white at that time (not now). There were maybe 2% black families living within it.

The percentage of Jewish students there was higher than the black students.

The school district was liberal, though, and the teachers regularly reminded students about the evils of bigotry. Our history classes covered the ugly parts of American history too, so later learning about the sugar-coating elsewhere in the country surprised me.

My older siblings, much older than me, had attended a different school district in the 50's and 60's when they were kids. Their student body was much more integrated, with the percentage of black students about the same as the percentage of black people for the whole country. Yet it was clearly more racist too, based on some upsetting stories that my siblings later shared with me. Their childhood community was mostly segregated, with mostly-white and mostly-black neighborhoods, but all within the same school district in their case.

Edit: The closest black family to my parents' house, a few houses down the street, had a black father that made anti-black comments to my mother at some kind of neighborhood event, explaining that's why he was happy that he moved his family there. Mom didn't know what to think or say, and changed the subject. His two daughters weren't close enough to my age for me to really know them, but they always dressed immaculately and carried themselves very "formally" in general.